
I started using Google Forms years ago as an assessment tool and have never looked back. Game changer!! I’m so excited to share 3 awesome Google Forms features that will make your teaching life so much easier!
Why Google Forms?
I quickly learned that there was so much value in a platform that could:
- Grade for me!
- Require zero paper
- Easily be shared with teammates and/or admin (document that data and student growth!)
- Analyze and save data in one place
- Export to a spreadsheet that can be easily sorted
Like most things in life, these features come with some drawbacks too, butI’m giving you tips to work around them.
What Cool Features Will Save Me Some Time?
- Lock Mode
- Import Questions
- Grade by Question
Lock Mode
If your school or district has Google and students login to a device with an account created within it, you can restrict students from navigating out of the tab their assessment is in. When a student opens the Google Form in lock mode, they can’t open any other windows or tabs.
Problems:
- students may have issues opening the form when they’re not on a district-issued device
- lock mode sometimes doesn’t give students the option to start the quiz (Tip: have them close and open the tab or window several times. Eventually the “start quiz” button will show up. It’s a pain, but it works!)
- students can still use the search bar on the top of their tab to type a math expression and see the answer (hopefully none of them are reading this!)
Import Questions
This was one of my favorite new features! I was always so frustrated that I couldn’t just grab questions from two different forms and combine them into a new form. Now, you can click “import” question in the toolbar on the right and select a form in your Google Drive to grab questions from.
Problems:
- When you choose the form you want to import from, you can’t really see the exact question you’re trying to import (Tip: Open the form you’re importing from to see each question).
Grade by Question
This option is for questions that are open-ended or a short response, not multiple choice.
Sometimes it’s just easier to grade all the responses for one question at once. In Forms, it will group any student responses that are exactly the same so that you can assign points to all of those responses one time (if they submitted the EXACT same answer – even spaces and capitalization will affect this). If you’ve assigned something that requires a longer answer, you will have more variations on the responses. Therefore, you will most likely have a different answer from every student.
Problems:
- If you try to start grading before all students are finished, two things will happen:
- If you’re in the middle of scrolling and grading (either by question or by student) and a student submits their form, your screen will refresh. Whatever you had done on that page will not have saved.
- If you get through grading all of the questions, when other students submit theirs, you have to go back through all of them again. It doesn’t automatically assign points to new submissions, even if the student had the same exact answer as one that had already been graded. You have to manually enter the point values again to all of the new responses (Tip: wait until everybody is finished to grade them, or grade the remaining forms by student, one at a time).




Google Forms are SUCH a great tool in the classroom, both for assessment and for collecting and organizing any information from students or parents. How are you using Google Forms in your classroom?
Looking for Digital Resources?
Check out some of these printable and digtal resources that use various strategies, including visual models, to teach common math skills:
- adding and subtracting decimals (digital and printable options)
- multiplying decimals (digital and printable options)
- dividing decimals (digital and printable options)
- adding and subtracting fractions (printable option - digital coming soon)
- multiplying fractions (printable option - digital coming soon)
- dividing fractions (printable option - digital coming soon)
- order of operations with grouping symbols (digital and printable options)
..